everything happens so quickly

i don't know how to live or to love, but i'd like to

Everything happens so quickly. The London planes brought back to life one cool, spring morning as if there had never been any mention of winter. Pats of butter yellow daffodils spread across the garden beds and the ROYGBIV of flowers making their entrance at the Sunday market. Buying a bouquet of my favorite ones (light pink tulips) and poking a sewing needle through the buds to keep them from unfurling.

source unknown.

In January, we shoveled the remains of holiday pines around the trees’ sturdy bases to protect their more delicate roots. The carousel of life spinning round and round. A girl next to me, fresh out of college, reacts in shock when she asks my age. “You look so young!” She says it with such disbelief I can’t help but feel thirty might be a death sentence (or life–, depending on which way you look at it). I press my heel against the spade, driving it deeper into the dirt.

I had spent those colder months pushing through the crush of bodies at Court Sq., trying to outpace the crowd. Some mornings, and always while running behind, the train would pause underground and the conductor’s garbled voice would sputter from the intercom, seeming to suggest we’d be moving shortly. It soon became clear the city would continue in motion no matter how long one remained still. Wherever you went, there would be the threat of time and its running out. Always the wonder of how late you were—how far behind you sat from where you had meant to be.

Before long, another August and its damp heat will rush in with the past. Those drawn out summer days and brief twilights reminding me of the teenage years. Sneaking out of the house to sprawl underneath the streetlamps of a church parking lot with P. and A., the pavement still wet from an afternoon storm. The early crawl through the nicer neighborhood with its ticky-tacky houses across the boulevard, to work at the day camp before closing shifts at the ice cream shop. My mother rolling down the car windows to whisk away the cloying smell of vanilla and cake batter clinging to my skin. Back then, it felt like I was waiting all my life to be where I am now—except now no longer looks anything like I imagined. Some nights I feel as if I’m still sat there in that parking lot, eyes turned towards the sky with fierce and desperate longing.

My friends are doing miraculous things like running for office, negotiating deals, and raising children; and I’m still checking the "Figuring It Out” box on dating apps. C. asks why I feel like I can’t entertain partnership until I achieve certain career milestones and I have no real answer for her. These are just the rules I’ve set for myself. When men tell me that I seem like a relationship person, I nod in agreement. I don’t tell them that my only real one, and healthiest example of love, still ended in being cheated on with my closest girlfriend for months. Or that I pretended not to notice because I was too overwhelmed by school and the mere thought of such a distraction would threaten to derail my studies. I don’t tell them that I had already mentally checked out and stopped calling weekly, or that I was secretly grateful when it was over because petty rage motivated me to finish among the top of my class that year.

I don’t tell them that I fell in love with AG. afterwards and spent the next six years in an on/off long-distance maybelatership, and I definitely don’t tell them about S. or the night he told me he loved me. That I’d said it back even though I didn’t mean it yet, because I saw the terror in his eyes during my elongated pause and decided it wouldn’t be a lie if I knew I would get there. I don’t tell them I spent my mid-twenties paying for this mistake and making myself small to prove I knew how to be good. That someone I loved told me I’d be a bad mother in order to hurt me and I’ve never been able to untangle myself from the grief of it.

I don’t tell them there are no happy marriages in my family and all roads lead to death or divorce. That I learned love was something hard-won for with perfect marks, obedience, and faith. Something begged for in the aftermath of raised voices and flat hands. I don’t tell them I’ve run every time someone demanded too much of me and chased when they’ve asked for less. That I rewrote the story of my parents in the movie because the first time I asked my mother if she’d do it all again she said, “probably not.” I don’t tell them I swore to never marry because I feared losing my freedom and couldn’t bear the thought of settling. And I especially don’t tell them love is a thing I decided I was only allowed once I’d become perfect. Those are things I like to keep to myself.

I. says Chiron is moving into Taurus and it signals the end of a seven year cycle. I ask her if that’s why the past has come back and followed me on Instagram. We sit by the water as it laps at the rocks and I almost believe myself when I say I’m trying to change. I start a new job, then go back to the old one, and then pick up a second. I fill up every second of time: booking shoots on the days in between and making it a point to respond to the 335 unread messages on my phone, RSVPing to parties and planning trips and staying out too late. I send a drunk text or two and, in the morning, swallow the shame of a fragility I’d meant to keep buried.

The doctor makes me come in for injections every week and refers me to specialists with intimidating names. I call my mother and pretend to be brave, and I don’t write for two months because I am not. I sit in waiting rooms thinking about the time I wasted boarding trains to nowhere, wondering if thirty really is it or if there’s still a chance for me to catch up. Spring speeding up the clock and everything happening so quickly. More quickly than I ever could’ve imagined.

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